Casket law Louisiana monks are challenging ought to be killed off: Jarvis DeBerry

If formality and ritual aren't your thing, and if the scorn of your peers doesn't bother you, you can wrap your dearly departed grandma in a potato sack, cover the body with two feet of dirt and rest easy. The state of Louisiana won't say a thing. However, if you want to bury your matriarch in a box but...

If formality and ritual aren't your thing, and if the scorn of your peers doesn't bother you, you can wrap your dearly departed grandma in a potato sack, cover the body with two feet of dirt and rest easy. The state of Louisiana won't say a thing. However, if you want to bury your matriarch in a box but run an end-around a funeral director, the state will then be all up in your business.

Louisiana law is clear: You can only buy caskets from duly licensed funeral directors. Without their expertise, how would you even know how big to make that box that the law doesn't even require?

A tape measure, you say? Well, yes, I suppose you could figure it out that way, but the state's funeral directors -- who've been granted the exclusive privilege to sell caskets to the bereaved -- say their tape measures are more accurate. You might cynically think they're protecting their profits. Nope. They're protecting you from your error-prone ways.

A group of monks from the St. Joseph Abbey in Covington head into the John Minor Wisdom United States Court of Appeals Building in New Orleans, Louisiana, Thursday, June 7, 2012. Rusty Costanza / The Times-Picayune

Monks at Covington's St. Joseph's Abbey have been challenging the constitutionality of the law that prohibits them from selling their handcrafted coffins. They've been winning. A federal district court judge ruled in their favor in July 2011. Tuesday at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel denied the Louisiana funeral board's request for an appeal. Those judges said the law does nothing to protect consumers and that the funeral directors had offered "nonsensical explanations" in its defense.

Chief among such nonsense has to be the federal court testimony given in June 2011 by the manager of a Metairie funeral home. He said opening up the market could lead to consumers buying caskets that are too small. The district court judge didn't buy it. Neither did the appellate panel, which in Tuesday's ruling, sent the case to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

"We insist that Louisiana's rules not be irrational," those judges wrote.

That's a tall order from the court. Scrubbing our laws of irrationality would take, er, monastic dedication. Who's got time for all that? Well, the men at St. Joseph's might. But I'm sure they'd be OK if for the time being just this irrational law were deep sixed.